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Bridge repair

February 28, 2012

Here’s a story that came to me as I was walking this morning along the bike path.

There’s a bridge across a river, important for the flow of raw materials and the goods made from them, from one side of the river to the other, from one community to another, and then back again. There’s a series of storms, and the center of the bridge collapses. The people living on either side of the bridge realize they have to work together to repair the bridge. To do this they establish new links with each other, including by phone and by mail, maybe even by email and Skype. They realize in the course of planning and executing the bridge repair that they can also share how they have developed their own contribution to the resource exchange that use to characterize their relationship, and that’s especially how the people on one side of the river view the upshot of their collaboration. But for the people on the other side, it’s more about how they re-established any connection at all, and a collaborative one at that, and how they figured out an overland route to use in the interim.